  Both kids had their half birthdays this month: Aidan's was July 18th and Ella's was July 21. We explained to Aidan that it means he can say he's 3 and a half years old when people ask him how old he is.
Unfortunately, he thought it means he's 4 now. He got into a slight skirmish in the Fort Collins park with a little girl over the issue. He can be very persistent. My crazy Eleanor has to do everything her own way, and sure enough, dental development is no different. Even though Ella doesn't even have all her front teeth yet (she has four top and three bottom), this past month she's brought in three molars. One woman ominously told me bringing in molars before front teeth makes for very crooked front teeth. We'll see. Ella hardly has stellar dental genes. Aidan wrote his first word this month: CAT! Now, he loves showing it off and writes it for anyone who will sit still long enough to watch. He's pretty good at writing most letters, and has just lately developed an interest in the phonetic sounds of the letters he sees all around him. But he's memorized rather than sounded out the spelling of cat. We'll be working on phonics in upcoming months.
If anyone has good experiences with teaching this, please let me know! Apparently, the kids' cousin Abigail, who is the same age as Ella, speaks the similar language that Ella's perfected and Aidan did in his day. It's the cutest constant rambling, punctuated with dramatic gestures and expressions. The average listener is lucky to pick out one intelligible word in a sentence, but mama knows what she's talking about. My aunt calls Abbie's language Abbinese! So now we call Ella's Ellanese. Magically, upon turning two, Aidan began to annunciate and we realized that he really was speaking sentences all this time. I expect about the same course of events with Ella. 
